Baby Bay is three months old and sounds as scrummy as his super-yummy mummy: "All my friends kept saying I would feel a loss of identity and how exhausting newborns are, but he is just incredible because he sleeps all night and he is so much fun." Bet her chums are glad to know how wrong they were!When my son was three months old, he too was an obliging poppet who slept at night and gurgled happily by day, and I hadn't yet learnt not to mention this fact to women whose babies sobbed uncontrollably and often inexplicably. Where Kirstie is wrong, however, is in believing she's not hugely "on trend", as we fashionistas put it, in asserting her desire to be a stay-at-home mother. Hardly a week goes by without the Daily Mail exultantly reporting a high-flying female executive abandoning the boardroom for the nursery. The Location, Location, Location presenter is just too scrumptious for the usual brickbats that accompany fame. She makes me think of crumpets, hockey and The Railway Children. In keeping with that throwback persona, she's just announced her intention to become a full-time mum (her son, Bay, was born in July) when her contract with Channel 4 ends in 2008: "I think of myself as Kirstie Allsopp, Bay's mother, now, not Kirstie Allsopp, TV presenter. It's increasingly common for celeb first-time mums (with the usual exception, thankfully, of Kate Moss) to announce that their gorgeous new bundle comes before their career and they will henceforth be forsaking crazed ambition for the domestic hearth.But I don't blame Allsopp for being a teensy bit precipitous. I know it's not a trendy thing to say but I want to stay at home and look after him." Bless her cotton socks, down to the touching use of "trendy", the sort of term now only used by vicars and Brown Owls to describe McFly.

I think I used the word "paralysis" before the Tories got hold of it in the present context. I am not specially proud of it, but it expresses perfectly adequately what it means. Mr Blair can easily have an off day in the Commons, as he did last Wednesday, but he can make no decisions for the future.What is worse, if anything, is to make decisions with the intention of tying Mr Brown down like Gulliver. Having made an unwise promise, he is stuck with it.Mr Murdoch said recently, in an interview with The New Yorker, that Mr Blair was henceforward a lame-duck Prime Minister, or words to this effect.

This is not the most staggering political insight I have ever read, though there is an interesting divergence between the great proprietor's views and those of his newspapers: for while his newspapers or, at any rate, The Sun regard Mr Blair as a good man fallen among socialistic idiots, Mr Murdoch thinks the Prime Minister has brought his troubles largely on himself, by saying he would go.Meanwhile, the old man is staying on in the matrimonial home. I don't deny it's vile to yearn for Schadenfreude at Kirstie Allsopp's expense, rather like plotting an assault on a liquid-eyed Jersey heifer as it nuzzles you trustingly. Mr Brown is always awkward - whether praising the American alliance, or Britishness, or whatever piece of nonsense has last come into his head - and the time has surely come to take the poor chap out of his misery More from Alan Watkins. Mr Blair had chosen to go at some date of his own choosing to get himself out of a hole. And the result of that was to bring about a tidal wash of sympathy for Mr Blair, both in the party and in the country at large.He was, people felt, being hard done by. An even greater Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been treated with even more cruelty and ingratitude.

This was the line taken by The Sun and, even if less stridently, by the rest of Mr Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. In fact, the two events are not comparable; or, rather, the event that occurred in 1990 is not the same as the series of events that started with Mr Blair's promise not to fight four elections, and continued with his promise not to make another conference speech, and is yet to come to a satisfactory conclusion.Mrs Thatcher, as she was then, was brought down by a combination of backbenchers and cabinet. All those speeches, hundreds of articles - and Mr Simon finds 15 seconds of fame with a somewhat tasteless video!It is not, perhaps, the lofty moral purpose that Mr Gordon Brown is on the lookout for. Whether the September emailers were organised by Mr Brown or on his behalf - and no very clear evidence exists one way or the other - the result was to implicate the Chancellor in the conspiracy, if conspiracy it was. Even Mr Jack Straw has expressed his reservations about Mr Simon's apparent frivolity, though Mr Simon could argue that we should not allow ourselves to become too solemn about these things and that he was doing it all for a good cause.The cause in question was the defeat of Mr Cameron rather than the rapid elevation of Mr Brown. But what made his work even more attractive to editors was that he had, or it was thought that he had, a rapport with Mr Blair and his entourage.

He became a columnist with The Daily Telegraph and an associate editor of The Spectator.As a Labour MP after 2001, he was even more loyal in his habits, if that were possible Reward from the Whips came there none. One was reminded of John Morley's observation to his hero W E Gladstone that journalists were by their slapdash methods and irregular lives rendered unsuitable for high office or, indeed, for employment of any description. His latest escapade has been to record a video making fun of Mr David Cameron. And Morley was himself a distinguished Victorian journalist, though the journalists Lord Salisbury, Winston Churchill, Ramsay MacDonald and Michael Foot all led their respective parties Let us, however, return to Mr Simon.